Passengers are seen through a reflection at MacArthur BART Station on Friday, November 2, 2018 in Oakland, Calif.

Photo: Amy Osborne / Special to The Chronicle 2018

Ten BART stations and a 15-minute bus ride separate Krea Gomez’s home in North Oakland from her parents’ apartment in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. But for a mother of six with no car, the cost to get there is crushing.

“It’s $4 to $5 a head, which is a significant amount of money,” said Gomez, who works at a social justice nonprofit. As fares inched up, she cut back family visits, shopping trips and outings to the Exploratorium. These days she often joins casual carpools to commute to her office in San Francisco’s South of Market.

Bay Area transportation officials have a plan to help: a 20 percent discount for low-income people to use BART, Caltrain, Muni buses and light rail or Golden Gate ferries and buses in the North Bay. Supporters hope to lift a steep, if little noticed, economic barrier for people who don’t live near their workplaces.

The move comes as transit agencies around the country struggle to ease costs for their neediest riders, only to find that their good intentions get hobbled by political wrangling and sparse funding. New York City began a program Friday that immediately hit criticism: It offered half-price fares, but only to about 30,000 people who already receive cash assistance.

The Bay Area’s version caused similar frustrations. Some riders say the assistance is insufficient, and it’s coming late. The discounts were approved in May but might not take effect until November, after years of study and an intricate bureaucratic process.

BART Board Director Lateefah Simon, who pressed for the fare reduction, agreed that it should be greater. “It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something,” she said. “If you live out in Contra Costa and you clean hotel rooms, BART gets really expensive.”

Housing tends to be cheaper far away from job centers, which raises the price of commuting. For many people, it means more transfers, more complexity and more fares tacked on. And BART’s fare system, unlike that of some other metro rail lines, charges more for longer trips.

“If you live far away, it’s because you’re less affluent,” Heisler said. “But the people who live far out pay more.”

Members of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission conceived of the fare reduction as a salve for this problem, with limitations. The program would run for up to 18 months — enough time for the commission to evaluate it and make revisions. It would apply to people earning 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or less: $24,280 annually for a single taxpayer, or $50,200 for a family of four. To qualify, people would submit income tax returns or eligibility cards from other social service providers. They would use Clipper cards to pay the reduced fare.

Roughly a quarter of BART riders fit this definition of low income, as do nearly 60 percent of Muni passengers, 14 percent of people riding the Golden Gate ferry and fewer than a tenth of Caltrain riders. Many of them are adults toiling at minimum wage jobs; the others are young students whom transit agencies hope to attract and keep.

“The agencies are trying to do this to get at a social equity issue that is front and center in our society,” said Randy Rentschler, legislative director at the MTC. And, he added, “there’s a bit of public transit conspiracy in the sense that we want young people to use the system and become comfortable with it.”

Still, when it comes to solving a problem as big as transit inequality, a 20 percent discount is just a start, Rentschler conceded. And even that required three years of discussion and a painful calculus. At $20.7 million a year, the program hits the limit of what four transit operators can provide without cutting service. MTC would pay $11 million a year, mostly from state gas taxes, and individual agencies would cover the rest. If the gas tax had been repealed in November, the plan would have fallen apart.

Some officials are skeptical.

“We have to figure out financially whether this is sustainable,” said BART board Director Debora Allen. She and others pointed out that transit systems lack a permanent funding source to cover their portion. Most of them rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies. BART, the outlier, also receives tax money but leans on fares to cover two-thirds of its operating costs; it’s among the most expensive metro rail systems in the country.

Others hope the discounts will have ancillary benefits, such as curbing fare evasion or staving off competition from Uber and Lyft. But Rentschler said the payoff is intangible because it’s about fairness.

“Public transit already offers a maze of different discounts — to high-volume users, senior citizens and youth,” he said. “The people sitting on the sidelines are the ones who need it most.”

Many riders would prefer a regional pass that applies to every system, bringing coherence to a balkanized Bay Area. Others don’t mind a piecemeal approach but say the fares should be lower and that more people should be eligible for a special rate.

Joshua Davis, a member of the pro-housing group East Bay for Everyone, noted that a family of four making up to $117,000 a year could qualify for a low-income apartment in San Francisco. That’s more than twice the income threshold set for the transit discounts.

“I realize that BART and other agencies have budgets to balance,” said Davis, who nonetheless urged officials to set a more realistic baseline. Davis knows firsthand how much the cost of transportation can eat into a person’s earnings: He used to spend $400 a month commuting by BART and Caltrain from Oakland to Palo Alto.

For people like Kisha Jackson, who quit her job as an executive assistant to care for her ailing father, anything helps. Jackson and her father take BART to get from his home in Oakland’s Lakeside neighborhood to doctor appointments in San Francisco. They use Uber and Zipcars to travel shorter distances.

“I’ll take any type of discount,” Jackson said.

Gomez also welcomes the program. Having never owned a car, she’s spent her whole life crisscrossing the Bay Area on mass transit. Then the price shot up, and she had to carefully consider each trip.

“For a family as big as mine, transportation is a big-ticket item,” Gomez said. Lightening that burden means more money for groceries or school supplies — and more visits to Bernal Heights.

Rachel Swan covers transportation for The Chronicle. She joined the paper in 2015 and has also reported on politics in Oakland and San Francisco.

Previously, Rachel held staff positions at the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, where she covered technology, law and the arts. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.